If you collect payments on behalf of others, card scheme enforcement has probably changed what is acceptable since you built it.
Card scheme enforcement has tightened sharply. Visa and Mastercard now penalise acquirers directly for unregistered aggregation, and structures that processed without question for years are failing due diligence and losing their merchant ID with little warning. The structure has not changed. The enforcement has. Switching provider does not help, because every mainstream acquirer applies the same test.
You are probably affected if
You are probably fine if
There are three structures acquirers accept, and they differ enormously in cost, timeline and in what they do to your customer proposition. We audit where you actually sit, cost the options honestly, and build the migration if one follows.
The same chain runs further in both directions than most teams instrument. An advertising click, a conversion recorded server-side so it survives ad blockers and browser privacy changes, a payment routed and captured, a ledger entry, a settlement reconciled. We build the whole path, which is why attribution arguments and reconciliation discrepancies usually turn out to be the same conversation.
Most teams taking card payments daily cannot say where a given payment sits on day three, or what it has already cost them. Click through it.
The gap between capture and settlement is where most reconciliation problems live, and the dispute window is why a payment is never finally yours on the day you receive it.